Late 2013, we gave a super early preview of an eastern-inspired, serpentine storm dragon named Ao Shin that was in the first phases of champion creation. Then, in the two years that passed (aside from a few comments in low-key conversations) we went silent. Totally a mistake on our part, and the mystery around this dragon has only increased over time. Weâ€™ve seen the question of â€œAo Shin where?â€ pop up all over the place, including being one of the most asked questions in our recently hosted preseason Q&A in China.

Now that 2016 is upon us and production schedules are being finalized for early this year, we finally have an update: the dragon that we previewed in 2013 has evolved tremendously over time. As such, we will not be releasing the champion that you know as Ao Shin, but in the first half of this year we will be releasing a dragon champion. His name is (tentatively) Aurelion Sol.

We canâ€™t say much more about Aurelion Sol, but we did want to share some of the challenges we faced and lessons we learned. While the major news is out of the bag, you can still read on if you want hear how the dragon formerly known as Ao Shin evolved over the course of two years.

First: Ao Shinâ€™s kit just didn’t pass muster. This is a pretty common problem we run into in the initial stage of champion creation, and while sometimes we can adjust on the fly (a useable â€˜paper kitâ€™ might have two or three core abilities that make things click), other times we need to shelve the entire concept and take a step back. Internally, we call this â€˜ice boxingâ€™ a champion until we can revisit with a fresh perspective.

Second: delivering on the unique shape of a serpentine dragonâ€™s body – long and powerful – in a game where instantaneous turning is key presents some unique technical challenges. Given enough time, we were confident we could solve the turning problem, but because Ao Shinâ€™s abilities werenâ€™t coming together we were reluctant to commit to engineering work that might just end up scrapped.

Finally – and this was the big one – we committed too early to Ao Shinâ€™s premise without really developing his thematic roots. Around the time we announced Ao Shin, we were in the process of slowing down our champion pipeline to figure out how to continue delivering resonant characters that feel unique to the League universe. We learned a lot during this time (still learning!) and when we examined Ao Shin with these new lessons – Why was he in Runeterra? What were his motivations? – we unearthed a fresh thematic that really set us off running.

So in the end, while weâ€™re sorry to have hyped up the idea of a serpentine, storm-wielding dragon for so long, weâ€™re still very excited to deliver a dragon champion this year that we hope youâ€™ll love. Aurelion Solâ€™s got some big shoes (claws?) to fill, but we still like surprises so stay tuned – any of our next few champions could be him!

We considered reverting the Elise MS nerf alongside the Runic Echoes nerf. We decided not to because we think she will be quite strong even with changes to RE. She was viable before the item, and will likely remain so after the reduction to its movement speed.

If it turns out we are wrong and she’s suffering, I don’t think we’d hesitate to put back her Movement Speed.

I don’t think there are plans for any brand new skins when his update comes out, but I do think the plan is to re-imagine the existing ones. For example, Emerald Taric won’t just feel like “Green Taric,” and Fifth Age won’t just feel like “Pink Taric” (though it will still be outrageous).

The revised Warlord’s is intended to be attractive to champions that repeatedly auto attack who are seeking sustain rather than damage (contrast with Fervor) and in a way that scales with offensive stats like crit, AS and Armor Pen, rather than defense (contrast with Grasp). We expect marksmen to be one of the primary groups Warlord’s appeals to as a result, though probably not the only ones. Fervor should be particularly appealing if you’ve got a team offering a lot of peel or are intending to grab lifesteal elsewhere, Warlord’s if you want some build path flexibility and have other strong damage sources on your team.

The strong crit synergy unfortunately felt like it restricted our ability to balance Warlord’s for a range of champions more than it allowed cool interactions with specific kits.

We also feel that masteries can’t be too spikey in terms of early versus late game performance. Some masteries slanting towards strength in particular parts of the game is fine. Masteries that just don’t contribute anything early game by contrast would need to be ridiculously powerful late game, given how the early game feeds into mid/late game.

I think it’s reasonable to believe that some marksmen might forgo a lifesteal item and take Warlord’s instead, though we might not see that initially (or might see it too often if the launch balance is overtuned).

The healing from Warlord’s is going to be regular lifesteal but only against champions and minions. That will function against player summoned minions, but won’t do anything against wards or jungle monsters.

Swain’s one of the champions we’re looking at for smaller adjustments in the mid season mage patch, along the lines of those Lucian and Twitch got in the Marksmen update. No confirmed direction/details for those changes yet though.

We actually have 3 separate Pods on Champ Up now. So there is a group working on Taric, another group working on Yorick and a 3rd Group working on the Mage Roster Update. The new structure we have is much different the the old days so I wouldn’t expect such large gaps in between VGUs now. Taric and Yorick should almost certainly come out this year, in fact, those probably won’t be the only 2 large VGUs that come out this year.

Just said most likely. Want to try to be as transparent as I can about this stuff, but if we hit some major road block things can still become iceboxed. Once a champion goes up on the support page it means that a rework is far enough along that we feel VERY strongly it will ship.

Following up on the Juggernaut itemization changes made in patch 5.16, particularly the additions of Dead Man’s Plate, Titanic Hydra, and Sterak’s Gage, I wanted to quickly go over our thoughts on the current state of these items.

Basically we’re seeing it in most games even on core Sunfire Cape users and core Frozen Heart users, even with Sunfire Cape having an identical stat-line – they just buy the Dead Man’s a bit later. It’s crowding out not just other armor options but other defensive options period, which points to it simply giving more for its price than items usually give.

As Cassiopeia is one of the mages we’re looking at for the mid season mages update and I’m the designer heading up her changes, I’m looking to get opinions/feedback from players on what some of their specific expectations for her are.

One thing I’m having a difficult time assessing is what players’ desires are as far as Twin Fang goes, and I do have some concern that opinion will be far from unanimous. I know a lot of players want Cass to be more “poison mage” than she currently is, and I think I have a good grasp on how that may be able to manifest, but I don’t really know what that means as far as what they want from Twin Fang. It may just be that you want Twin Fang to remain mostly as it is now, with kit changes elsewhere. It may be that you want there to be more times where casting Twin Fang isn’t the best thing to be doing.

Any opinions on the matter would be greatly appreciated. For what it’s worth, I’m probably not going to be able to invest time in hundreds of responses to this thread, but I will check in on it periodically to get your ideas.

Thanks,
Repertoir

Edit:
Thanks for all the input here. I’m not sure exactly what this means is going to come of Cass or Twin Fang, but I am going to try a some iterations based on what’s going on here. I don’t think this single thread can really provide a singular correct direction to take things, but it’s at least given me some perspective on how people feel about the ability. For what it’s worth, I’m probably going to test out some stuff where E has cool interactions on poisoned targets that aren’t simply a reset (and probably lower the cooldown baseline), and I’d also like to test out some different iterations that seek to put some more gameplay behind when it’s actually a good time to go in and E spam (unlike on Live, where the answer is basically always), and make those times really rewarding. Thanks again!

What Braum should and shouldn’t be able to jump to was something we looked at a lot during his development. We had some clear strengths and weaknesses in mind for Braum though, and those were really helpful in assessing what tools he should have. Gameplay wise we wanted to ensure Braum had a clear niche he was really good in, and that there were some games where he’d be an ok, but not great pick.

If what you wanted was a strong defensive front line, who worked well with frequent auto attacking allies, Braum would be a great choice, especially if the enemy was running a really missile heavy comp. If you needed really strong peel/disengage though, you’d want someone like Janna instead. Or if strong engage and reliable lockdown was what you were after someone like Leona was the better choice.

Those guidelines lead us to conclude that being able to ward jump wasn’t appropriate for Braum. In particular it gave him much more powerful initiation than was appropriate (disengage/wall hopping was a lesser concern). By gameplay goals, and by personality, Braum was intended to be a defensive, helpful champion first and foremost, so we wanted to put power into those aspects of him, rather than having to balance him around a reliable way of jumping straight onto the enemy. Early versions of Braum’s W went so far as to only allow him to jump to allied champions, not minions, that ended up feeling excessively constraining though. We also talked a fair bit about how much power Braum should be able to offer in a dive buddy situation (following another allied champion in, and then helping lock people down), ultimately concluding that was a reasonable strength and still fit well with his intended teamplay based approach.

As far as ward jumping on Lee Sin, Kat and Jax goes that’s something we ultimately decided to balance those champions around (it’s a significant strength, not a free bonus). It wasn’t originally an intended mechanic, and there have been some good arguments for taking it away at times, intuitiveness and the way it circumvents the intended weaknesses of unit targeted dashes/blinks in particular. The plays it allows though are good fits for the intended strengths of those champions, all of whom are strong on the offense and intended to be slippery. It’s also a strongly embedded part of their playstyle, which added a bit of extra weight to keeping it.

Yeah, there’s a good secondary argument there certainly. Even if Braum was a non support tank who didn’t buy Sightstone though we’d still feel not being able to jump to wards was definitely the right call.

Current expectation is that there’ll be visual updates to support kit changes, but not otherwise. Same approach as with the marksmen update for example.

A lot of the artists on the Champion Update team are focused primarily, or entirely, on the full scale relaunches like Poppy, Taric etc. For those we target a full visual overhaul, whereas the class updates are gameplay driven work with art updates focused on what needs to be changed to make small to medium sized adjustments to kits.

It isn’t too common. It’s generally done if it’s a project Champion Update takes on. Examples of that would include the mass texture rebalances that were done last year, or something similar to Shen’s update, where both gameplay and visuals were updated.

That said, changing content a player has already purchased is tricky because they’ve bought something they enjoy, and changing it could change how they feel about it, which isn’t fair to them.

We are actually working on this. Both in terms of tech and artistry. So for instance. My first VO was dunk master Darius. –lots of taunts. But not as effective as he could be. We advanced the tech on Rek’sai. I then used that tech on Tahm. Then based on what we learn from that, Beefpunchbeef stayed up a bunch of late nites so I could give Illaoi a whole new style of interactions. Jhin then pushed that forward. An important gate to remember is this tech and techniques are developed on new champs and champ relaunches. We are gaining this stuff– and slowly it will make its way through the roster. It will very very probably happen and on a champ in 2016…. then begin to spread to other champs and relaunches.

Keep in mind she believes in reincarnation, and unlike our world has empirical evidence that it exists and that there is life after death.

As for taking other people’s stuff, youre assuming that she would keep it. She doesnt want you to value stuff.. The common prayer for nagakabouros involves taking some of your money (or stuff) and giving it to the sea. Symbolically the gesture is saying, I wont hold onto things i dont need. I will find a way to get more if need more.

Her god is storms, the sea, and life. It assumes change will and must happen. Also life in the serpent isles is hard, you have to be strong and adaptable to survive.

Mini game was preharrowing, that man was stagnating and thus st risk of becoming a ghost if he died. (Endlessly repeating the same mistakes he made in life)

For a long while, weâ€™ve been thinking about old splash art, specifically splash art belonging to the skins of previously updated champions. As you are likely aware, most champion updates have not been accompanied by comprehensive splash art reworks, creating a problem where certain splashes are outdated or inaccurate representations of what you actually see in-game.

Luckily, we have a solution to this problem: Do. All. The. Splashes.

tl;dr: We are including complete splash refreshes with all future champion updates, and weâ€™re working our way back through previously updated champions to bring their splashes up to par.

Simple solution; huge problem

When we originally started updating champions, we didnâ€™t really have the bandwidth to include a full splash refresh with each update. League has a lot of art needs; we couldnâ€™t take a full team of illustrators and sequester them for months to work exclusively on old splashes. If refreshing splashes with every update had been identified as a must-have at the time, the lack of illustration resources would have bottlenecked a lot of content.

That said, new skin splash art has always felt like a missing piece of the champion update process â€“ especially when major reworks can completely change almost everything about a championâ€™s appearance. Now that we have the right resources in place, weâ€™re ready to start filling in the gaps, one champ at a time.

Poppy was the first champion to receive a complete splash art refresh alongside her visual and gameplay update. Shen, whose update was revealed last week, is getting the same treatment, bringing new or updated splashes to the Rift along with his flying magic ninja sword and oh-so-fashionable Crocs. This is the new normal; every champion update from here on out will include splash art to go along with the changes.

One note: Not all splashes need dramatic, obvious overhauls. Some of Shenâ€™s splashes have simply been updated and improved to more accurately reflect visual tweaks, while some have been rebuilt from scratch. The goal isnâ€™t reinvention for the sake of reinvention, but bringing the old splashes closer to in-game accuracy and Leagueâ€™s current artistic sensibilities.

About those old updates

In addition to shipping reworked and refreshed splash art with new champion updates, weâ€™re going back through every previously reworked champion and making sure they receive the same attention where needed. Itâ€™s going to take a while to get it all done (there are a lot of updated champs and a lot of skins), but weâ€™re hoping to ship a few of these side updates per year and already have a couple in the works.

Weâ€™ll keep you updated as we refine our timelines and work through Leagueâ€™s massive post-update-skin splash backlog.

In the meantime, we hope youâ€™re enjoying Poppyâ€™s and Shenâ€™s new splash art, and weâ€™re excited to finally be moving this process into full production.

“It’s still possible that Thunderlords is over-tuned after all this, but bringing the others more in line with the leader should help us gauge how big the discrepancy is”

This is enacting that part of the 6.1 patch notes.

Currently, though there has been a wave of experimentation shortly after patch 6.1, the trend isn’t towards significantly more diversity.

With Thunderlord’s we’re using it as a moving goal post, it’s the benchmark to hit. Move others towards it -> push Thunderlord’s back slightly -> move others towards it (and in that regard, there will not be a change to TLord’s in 6.3 but we will try to get more changes to other masteries in 6.3 or 6.4). There’s also a couple misses in the current setup we’d like to address. Deathfire has little to no sense of feedback to it and Warlord’s is realistically used by very little of the roster (notably because it has no value before your first significant item).

On this change in particular: I’m purposely avoiding hitting the damage at all because the burst effect is the reason you pick the mastery. Instead, these are in the line of tweaking the accessibility of the mastery. TLord’s right now has up to a 10 second window to get your full proc. This has made the mastery more of a “bonus damage rider” than it has a “intentioned burst effect” for pretty much every mastery. This can be a difficult thing to balance around.

The duration of Thunderlord’s stacks that are applied on enemies actually resets every time they’re applied.

At 5 seconds, this means I can reasonably accidentally get Thunderlord’s to proc by just back and forth light poking with a single attack or spell every 5 seconds. Discounting the last stack (because that obviously procs it), this means that Thunderlord’s had an uptime of up to 10 seconds.

So that nerf is aimed at hitting “incidental” power in favor of “committed” power. For most multi-hit burst characters (and characters that free-proc it, like MF), this is a nil change.

I’d prefer not to look at any mastery instead of another mastery but instead evaluate all, otherwise you create blindspots.

I do agree that Precision is running pretty powerful, and it might be candidate to drop a bit more. However (and this is just looking at Plat+ data), 1/3rd of Thunderlord’s users actually go Intelligence instead after the last nerf we did to Precision. With Precision, we need to be extra careful since it’s not the only mastery of significant power in that slot.

We’re currently experimenting with a Warlord’s rework (this showed up on the PBE during the 6.2 cycle).

The distinct lack of any power at the start of the game for most champions makes it difficult to make it an option for many while not silly for three specific champions. So that’s the primary focus of the rework.

Yes, definitely. And I strongly believe the lack of any decent feedback is a major contributor to deathfire feeling weak.

This isn’t a slamdunk case of “well, we need to focus on satisfaction” for the other keystones though. We should and are looking at opportunities, but even looking at other tiers on this line Bone of Stone is actually used about 13% more than Grasp of the Undying. Especially noteworthy that Bond of Stone is distinctly lacking in strong feedback.

FWIW, from what I’ve seen of “optimal” cases, Grasp is almost every melee top laner and Bond of Stone is almost every melee support except Alistar. And then Strength of Ages is every jungler not running Thunderlord’s.

I agree having more information available for not just Assassin mastery is ideal.

I’m resistant to having too much on the tooltip though. Long tooltips for a lot of players creates a “TL;DR, just give me what’s ‘best’ and let me get in game”. Short tooltips that are more scannable enables more players to make quick judgment calls instead of playing follow the leader.

However… for those willing to dive for information and optimize to it, that mindset is exactly wrong. To balance the two we’re actively trying to think of ways of having more “expandable” type of knowledge sources or ways of pushing that information to someplace that will help the information digging group without harming the scanning group. For example, the hover overs on item tips in the shop that was added with preseason is a clear example of this in action.

Mastery tips are a little more difficult, since they are already a hover over and thus we can’t use the same trick twice. So it might be a bit til we figure out where to put it.

As a user, does it really affect you? If you’re hardcore enough, you’re already going to external websites for your build advice, rune/mastery pages, guides, etc. I find it ends up being a happy marriage between the official website giving you enough information to be able to play the game reasonably. And if you’re really looking for in-depth content, it’s totally fine to look elsewhere.

It does leave players feeling the distaste of it not being available to them first-party, but in terms of function over form, I feel the present-day system works.

Assassin tells you that you deal bonus damage with no champions nearby. So, not for a duo laner, and not useful in a teamfight. The specific number will really never change your gameplay. 1.5% damage is not enough to make you want to mis-position as Zed, or refuse to take your return flight on R after Death Mark.

Based on learnings from yesterdayâ€™s failed test in Vietnam, weâ€™ve been improving our internal load test. This will allow us to better vet fixes before shipping them to live. We plan on internally testing the queue over the next two days, which unfortunately means you shouldnâ€™t expect Dynamic Ranked or new champ select in Normal Draft this weekend. If tests perform well, we will look to roll out to one affected region (to be decided) on Monday. If that is stable and successful, we will roll out to all affected regions until service is fully restored.

ORIGINAL POST PST 1/21 EVENING:

Hey everyone,

We wanted to share an update on new champ select and Dynamic Ranked ahead of the weekend. We understand itâ€™s been a frustrating week, and are committed to getting Dynamic Ranked and new champ select up and running again.

Whatâ€™s Wrong:

New champ select and Dynamic Ranked runs on a brand new backend that performed well (after initial hiccups) during live tests in North America and Turkey. However, when we rolled it out live at the beginning of the 2016 Ranked Season, the high volume of games played knocked the new service down in some regions.

What’s Next:

We havenâ€™t pinpointed a solution yet, but once we have a fix weâ€™re confident in, weâ€™ll be extremely deliberate in rolling new champ select and Dynamic Ranked back out to the game. The last thing we want is to return the feature to you, only for it to need to come down again. When we do have a fix, weâ€™ll start in one region, and if successful, roll out to other affected regions.

FAQ:

Q: Do my ranked games count?
A: The placement games played in Dynamic Ranked and/or Solo/Duo queue do count and will transfer when Dynamic Ranked returns

Q: What about Party Rewards?
A: Party Rewards Weekends will be extended to compensate for Dynamic Ranked and new champ selectâ€™s downtime

Weâ€™ll continuously update this post as long as new champ select and Dynamic Queue remain down. Thank you for your patience.

After making improvements to how new champ select and Dyanmic Ranked handles high volumes of games, we attempted a fix last night in Vietnam (1/21 PST). The queue showed some improvement, but ended up failing again The team’s been digging into those test results since late last night, learning from them and applying them to our next test. That’s the absolute latest.

Our main problem with Vlad is his Q. It’s a low CD, targeted, resourceless spell that restores health. It doesn’t have much interesting decision making for Vlad, if it’s ever strong early he just shuts a lot of people out of lane and the main ways to deal with it are to either sustain even more or to punish Vlad really hard when he trades.

Vlad’s also got a bit of a ‘stat check’ issue, where he’ll just reliably outclick a lot of opponents 1v1 without sufficient avenues for being outplayed. That’s not ideal, it’s a lesser issue though since it doesn’t kick in until later in the game when 1 v 1 counterplay is less important than team v team counterplay.

Statikk and the other folks working on the mage update will be talking in detail about why these particular champs. At a high level our goal with these class updates is to increase distinction between characters. With the mage update especially we’re also looking at some champions that are distinct, but when functional aren’t healthy for the game or are in an ok spot already but have a fair bit of untapped potential for differentiation.

Ought to bring more distinct things to a team:

Vel’Koz – Really distinct to play as, cohesive, feels fair to play against. Doesn’t bring enough distinct to a team though, so lacks a clear strategic niche or specialized tool offered. Goal with him will be to offer clearer situations where he’s the right pick when you want AP poke.

Brand – Pretty similar to Vel’Koz overall, in that he lacks a clear enough niche, so primary gameplay argument for picking him is when he’s the most damaging AOE mage. Needs a somewhat more distinct toolkit basically.

Distinct, but have significant game health challenges:

Vlad – Does distinct things, but can be really unhealthy. Work on Vlad’s going to involve a lot of ‘how do we preserve the core of what he does while adding ways to play against him’.

Malz – More game health issues than anything else. Counterplay’s not great in particular, with Malz needing to just click on you and kill you given his squishiness, immobility, lack of reach, vulnerability to item system counters. Has a lot of distinctive stuff going on though.

Untapped potential/Confused identities:

Cass – Confused identity, unclear niche (sustained damage almost marksmen like pattern, versus poison spreading potential, versus stacking power, versus counter initiator etc). Work on Cass will need to start with constructing a clear picture of what her concept should be (suspect that’ll include stripping out the stacking gameplay, though that’s a guess).

Zyra – Does reasonably distinctive things, but has the potential for quite a bit more. Also ends up either a strong bully or struggling to function a bit too often.

Finally, as with the marksman update in preseason, we’ll also be making some small tweaks to a number of other mages at the same time as these bigger changes (things like the Q reset on Twitch for example).

We decided we’d be best off focusing on a couple of sub types of mage here, which are basically sustained damage mages and pick mages. Artillery mages (Xerath, Ziggs etc with really long range) and supportive mages (Ori, Karma etc) are groups we might tackle later, though it wouldn’t surprise me if there was more value in tackling a different group instead (assassins or some types of tank instead).

As far as Lux/Xerath/Ziggs go I do think there’s a bit more overlap there than’s preferable, particularly between Lux/Xerath on pick/burst a dude and Xerath/Ziggs on clear waves/poke champs repeatedly. Lux does bring a more supportive kit than the others though, Ziggs gets more area control/mobility but gives up reliability against champions, and Xerath’s got phenomenal backline access. As a result there’s an ok current state distinctiveness wise. Potentially means they might just need smaller adjustments, rather than larger scale work, to pry them apart a bit.

We understand there are a number of people that don’t want changes to Vel’Koz and as discussed think there’s a lot about Vel’Koz that’s already really good. Not disputing or ignoring that sentiment. We believe though that every champion needs to bring a distinct purpose to the their team and that Vel’Koz doesn’t deliver well in that regard. That makes him a great candidate for some work – good generally, but with a specific problem area that brings him down overall.

In terms of scope the changes to most of these changes are unlikely to be large, do expect them to be bigger than ‘hardly noticeable’ though.

We hear all of you on Vel’koz, and our opinions on him are actually very similar to yours. We love his combos, his geometry, death laser, and true damage. There is very little likelihood that his abilities will be changed in how they are used (with possible exception of his W), or his play significantly altered.

However we also want players in a draft to see their comp, their opponent’s comp, and pick Vel’koz thinking “this would be a great game specifically for Vel’koz” rather than simply “this would be a great game for any long range mage with a lot of AoE”. For scope context, currently the plan for Vel’koz is much more along the lines of Caitlyn, who also kept essentially her entire kit, but had it unified around headshots.

It seems your guys’ expectations on how much we’ll warp some of these champions just because they’re in “the 6” is quite large and drastic. Guess it’s understandable given some of our track record. It’s important to consider that our changes have ranged from as small as Darius and Miss Fortune to as large as Mordekaiser and Graves.

Our current plans for Vel’Koz might literally be the smallest scope changes we’ve ever done in a class update. In fact, I could understand how some people may not even really perceive it as a significant update and more of a “patch note.”

Either way, your downvotes are loud and clear. You don’t really want Vel’Koz to change much. We don’t really plan on moving Vel’Koz’s core at all – just want to amplify what’s already there.

The answer to this is that small mechanical/gameplay tweaks may require much more substantial visual or audio effects to make work. As an example, imagine that we were to change Vel’Koz’s W and E so that they also had minor split-shot/geometry elements (this is just theoretical example; it isn’t the plan for him). Even if the gameplay effect of the change was small, we may still need some significant visual’s to have that not look super janky when it happens.

Heimer didn’t make it far. We feel he is really Distinct and Cohesive as the turret dude, and mainly lacks in terms of game Health (mastery and counterplay surrounding turrets in particular). Similar to Fiddle though, he has huge strategic weaknesses and strengths that opponents and allies can play around. He is still a prime candidate to get some tweaks and tuning with the sweep though.

Anivia was actually very close to being selected. Ultimately though, Anivia is already pretty Distinct (all her spells outside of E are pretty unique), Cohesive (frost phoenix), and fairly Healthy. We think Anivia can shine even with something as little as a ramping effect based on how long enemies remain in her R (this is all hypothetical off the top of my head…) and few other additional number tweaks.

I’m not on champ up. But in general, its a very, very small team working around deadlines. Rewriting, recording, processing and then having all 17+ languages localized and recorded takes several months. And because they are always trying get the best work done they can, they have to prioritize. So if a champ’s VO is “acceptable” they might instead use that time to work on another champ whose VO is “awful.” Eventually, they will make their way through the whole lineup several times… but they can’t high polish every aspect of a champ– all the time.

The next class update will be focused on â€œtraditionalâ€ Mages and Iâ€™m here to give you guys and gals some of the initial details. Similar to the Juggernaut and Marksman releases, these updates aim to take look at an entire class of champions and accomplish 2 primary goals:

Ensure the class as a whole is relevant and satisfying to play

Differentiate each champion within the class

Why Mages?

Many Mages are intended to lack mobility but have not necessarily been given clear answers as to what they should do about it or why they work without it. For each sub-class of Mages (this is something weâ€™ll dive into more in a different post) these answers will vary, but our intent is to make it clear that each of these champions is powerful in their own unique way.

On the flip side of the coin, many of them no longer meet our evolving gameplay standards of interactivity, depth, uniqueness, etc. This is also an opportunity to go back and adjust these champions (especially some of our older ones) making them more interesting to play as, with, and against.

Who are we working on?

Similar to the Marksman update, weâ€™re aiming to release ~6 significant updates. The champions we are currently considering (but are still subject to change) are Malzahar, Velâ€™Koz, Brand, Vladimir, Cassiopeia, and Zyra.

For each of these champions we aim for them to be 3 things:

Distinct – offer a unique reason to be picked

Cohesive – deliver on their core thematic and gameplay fantasy

Healthy – balance-able and fun to play as and against at all skill levels

Note that given the scope of these projects, we wonâ€™t necessarily solve every issue on every champion – and fortunately we won’t have to since all of the champions already succeed in their own way at some of the above.

On top of the 6, we are again looking to do a sweep across the entire class (as we did with the Marksman) to find potential tweaks that will make them more unique, interactive, and exciting to play. The smaller-scale changes done to Twitch and Lucian are good examples of this.

What can you expect? When?

Weâ€™ve learned a lot from our previous projects and better understand the line between something unique and something unfamiliar. Our priority is to find ways to evolve and enhance the current direction of a champion while still accomplishing the above-stated goals.

In some ways, the feeling of change is unavoidable; we are updating these champions so things WILL be different. Weâ€™re confident that we can retain the things you guys love while adding new dimensions.

This is all still a far ways off, so donâ€™t expect anything soon. As you can infer from the title, weâ€™re aiming to release these changes around mid-year and weâ€™ve only just begun to delve deeply into these projects.

How can you help?

Weâ€™d love to have your guysâ€™ feedback and opinion on the Mages before and during their development process rather than only at the tail end – especially for the â€œbig 6â€ (Malzahar, Velâ€™Koz, Brand, Vladimir, Cassiopeia, Zyra).

We are most interested in the following about your favorite champion:

What aspect is most core or sacred to their identity?

What issue bothers you the most when playing them?

This doesnâ€™t mean weâ€™ll be magically giving everyone dashes or any other instant remedies to all their problems (weaknesses often exist for a good reason). Instead, this information will help us understand which direction to take each champion and where the opportunities lie.

We wonâ€™t be talking in the short-term about exact changelists since weâ€™re still in such a state of flux, but we hope you guys are as excited as we are about the updates ahead!

Swain was definitely very high on our “want to do” list. What it really came down to is that we feel he really needs a full-on rework (gameplay, thematics, visuals) similar to Sion or Poppy in order to really deliver on an awesome version of Swain.

A large reason why we have chosen the current 6 is based off our confidence that we can deliver a solid update given the more limited scope they will get being as a part of a class update. We’re being a lot more careful about over-reaching since it’s definitely bitten us in the past.

Really substantial change for Swain’s likely to be quite a way off yeah (highly unlikely this year, can’t predict so usefully beyond that). We do think he’d benefit a lot from a full overhaul, he’s certainly not in Taric, Yorick etc tier though, they’ve got significantly bigger problems than he does.

Vel’Koz is a great champion, but he honestly lacks Distinctness. He has some hints here and there of uniqueness (Q targeting, true damage from Deconstruct, etc.) but none of them are pushed to a point where it truly differentiates him.

Don’t worry, even within the 6, the amount of change each champion will see is pretty drastically different.

We’re not going to be ready to talk details of what will/won’t change for quite a while. It’s likely that Vel’Koz’s changes will be at the small end of the spectrum though, he’s fundamentally solid apart from his lack of distinct enough outputs (what he does isn’t distinct enough, how his does it is very distinct though).

Fiddle is also a champion we considered, but ultimately felt wasn’t the right fit.

To do a quick rundown on our perception:

Distinct – Fiddle is extremely distinct on the roster. Playing as and against him offer unique experiences.

Cohesive – Fiddle is decent in terms of cohesiveness. He has a somewhat niche thematic as a terrifying scarecrow, but it’s understandably cool. It could probably be pushed a bit further especially in terms of the satisfaction from all his base spell (Drain, Terrify, and Dark Wind).

Healthy – This is debatable, but Fiddle is certainly not the largest health problem in the game. Tactically, his spells’ gameplay could probably be more robust in terms of interactivity (counterplay). Strategically though, there are many ways to deal with Fiddle whether through vision, knockbacks, stuns, etc.

Fiddle is certainly a bit dusty and old-feeling, but that means he may be more in need of a visual / polish pass more than anything. It’s not like he wouldn’t benefit with some more significant work, but he’s a champion that we feel can be a put in a decent spot even with just some minor number tweaks.

Really good point. We don’t intend to destroy Support playstyles, but truthfully many of these champions’ fantasies and gameplay manifest best in a role where they can get gold and be the primary threat for their team.

We’re very aware that Zyra, Vel’Koz, and even Brand to some extent all have identities in the Bot Lane.

We haven’t yet started work on Zyra other than ideation, but one of the things we tended to be excited about was more plant interactions, like she brings the forest alive around her. Not sure where that means we’re going to take her, but I am excited to see what the team comes up with.

The more we work on these group champion projects, the more I think we tend to find that if someone already has something going for them (like Zyra an “counterengage mage”), it’s usually a good idea to start ideation with how we might be able to crank that current strength up to 11.

Simple is a great rule of thumb to lean on. We’re definitely keeping that in mind for these projects.

We agree with you on the “mini-games” thing. Mechanics start feeling like forced “mini-games” when they feel arbitrary, uninteresting, or simply don’t align with the expectations and desires of the champion. We understand this space a lot better after the past few projects.

We think mini games, when well done, can feel like a really fun, natural part of a champion’s playstyle in a way that expresses their personality/theme. Draven axe catching for example taps into his show off nature, Bard’s chime collecting fits well on a weird dude that wanders and saves things etc. If the minigame doesn’t feel compelling, or doesn’t fit with the champion it’s on however then yeah, that can feel pretty jarring. I’d agree Skarner’s an example of that – if he had a reason to really want to defend the crystals in the jungle it might be another matter (e.g. if they contained others of his kind, frozen, that could eventually come out late game and join his fight).

We’re going to try and tackle Ryze before the mid year, we think he’s enough of a problem we need to act sooner . Unclear whether that’ll mean some degree of rework or just significant balance changes.

If I recall correctly, Syndra made it pretty far through the selection process, but I believe we determined that she either needed a ton of work to really spice things up on her, or that we could give her a little love on the mechanics side closer to release and still get pretty good mileage. As these projects tend to fall in between these two amounts of work, we ultimately passed on her in favor of others.

I’m interested to know why you think Xerath is in a weird spot. Is it because of the state of the meta-game? Or is it that there’s something he’s failing to deliver that he seems to be intended to be doing?

As far as what we thought, Xerath seems to be up to par in Distinction, Cohesiveness, and Health. I’ve seen some people argue his gameplay is too similar to Lux to be considered distinct, but we actually see Xerath as more of an extreme range DPS mage, whereas Lux is more of an extreme range burst caster that relies heavily on catching squishies out and killing them with quick full combos.

I don’t think it’s a great ability, in particular because it can be really unclear what result will happen before she uses it, leading to press the button and hope plays that can feel unfair (in a way you can’t influence) to one player or the other. It’s also an ability that, due to the way it can punish fighting back and its nature as a targeted spell, can leave opponents without apparent options.

Having said that though there are a lot of other champions/abilities I think we’d be much better off looking at first that need the work more. An Irelia rework someday’s a definite possibility, think it’s unlikely we’ll do one this year though.

We don’t have any plans to make significant changes to Singed (almost certainly balance adjustments at some point, but none currently planned). He’s got a distinct playstyle, a deep mastery curve, creates great high moments and certainly isn’t a jack of all trades. He is a bit weird thematically, but not in a ‘this guy’s failing to deliver on his core fantasy’ kind of way.

I’m not personally convinced the root from the Fling/Mega Adhesive combo’s sufficiently relevant to justify its existence on the kit, could imagine a world in which we took that out and replaced it with something a bit less niche. I don’t play Singed much myself though, so I might be just unaware of a bunch of value that interaction provides.

We’ve been experimenting with some possibilities over the last couple of weeks, including changing the 4th buff to something a bit more felt than minion/monster damage. Currently waiting to get some insight into how dragon’s being valued in the start of the ranked season/first couple of weeks of professional play though to inform how big our changes should or shouldn’t be.

The 2016 ranked season is now live! Gather your allies and gear up for all new challenges as you climb the ladder in 2016. Weâ€™ve introduced a swath of changes over the course of preseason, as well as newÂ dynamic groups — now you can queue for ranked play with any number of friends. With new champ select, youâ€™ll queue up for your two best positions — youâ€™re guaranteed to always end up with one of the two positions you select — and join a team of players whoâ€™ve done the same.

To learn more about the 2016 Season, visit the season homepage here or check out the patch notesover yonder. Itâ€™s a new season of GGs, and weâ€™ll see you on the battlefield!

Celebrate the launch of new champ select and the 2016 ranked season with Party Rewards. Howâ€™s it work? Simple. The larger your premade group, the larger the IP bounty you rake in. The bonus is even bigger for new champ select-enabled queues like Normal and Ranked draft. The All-Star bonus from Team Fireâ€™s win at All-Stars is active in Taiwan, NA, and Korea!

Check out the details below!

Premade size

New champ select queues

Other queues

1

0%

0%

2

125%

50%

3

175%

75%

4

225%

100%

5

450%

150%

Party Rewards are live starting today (10:00AM PST on January 20) until 11:59PM PST on January 24. Weâ€™ll see you on the Rift!

TL;DR Dynamic queue was disabled because of a load issue, Solo/Duo Ranked is temporarily re-enabled, and all matches played in this mode still count towards your future Dynamic ranking.

Earlier today, we saw an issue on EUW that required us to disable the dynamic queue system. This was due to an issue with player load on the servers. This has also affected the KR server in a similar way.

As a result of this, all ranked modes based on the dynamic queuing system were disabled and remained down while we continued to investigate. When deciding on a course of action we had two options:

We chose option b) because we wanted to ensure that those of you who enjoy ranked could still play your placement matches. As we did not have a clear ETA on a fix, we proceeded to re-enable Ranked Solo/Duo until the issue is resolved.

What does this mean for your placements and rating?

Any games played on the currently available solo/duo queue system will count towards your placements and ranking when the new system is back up. For example, if you already played 2 games before the issues began in Dynamic Draft and 6 more in Solo Queue, youâ€™d have 8 games played – and these all count towards your placements.

Why are other regions not affected?

Before we introduced this feature, we used a simulated environment to load test the entire system. Live implementation was first conducted on TR and NA with no major glitches. However, some subsystems of the dynamic queues didnâ€™t scale up correctly when running on a larger live environment.

What are the next steps?

Our engineers are actively working to fix and re-enable dynamic queues in EUW. As of now we have no ETA but our tech teams will provide an update when we have more information to share. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: To answer a question some of you may have regarding Party Rewards, a several day event that offers bonus IP for playing with friends. We’re holding this event back for EUW until issues are resolved. Once Dynamic Queues are back we’ll look to enable Party Rewards and make sure that players on EUW have the same amount of time to earn IP with friends.

We don’t consider Live environments as testing platforms. That would be dangerous and unfair to our players. Most of our features go through similar process after the development phase: functional testing -> load testing -> initial deployment to previously selected environments -> few days of player behavior testing (collecting players usage data) -> full deployment everywhere else. The NA & TR deployments week ago just helped us properly understand player reactions, gather important behavioral data and eventually tweak and adjust the service globally. You know, hundreds of dynamic variables here and there…

There were some minor issues in NA, but in general the service was and still is stable. Load testing of large services is always tricky though as one has to simulate the load in development labs. You can’t just get millions of players to test your service live — it must be done artificially as a set of ongoing software trials. We always go much higher than the expected traffic, and usually get highly expected results, like the one with the months-long EUW load tests before the new data center deployment in AMS. No matter how precise you are, live environments can be unpredictable and sometimes even tiny unexpected factor is enough to get one subsystem’s thread on hold. Obviously there are larger systems out there in the internet, but they are usually distributed and can handle the load separately. Our environments work differently — there is a distribution in given service’ cluster, but in general EUW, NA, KR, etc, are single entities handling the entire traffic all by itself.

Sorry for longer post. We’ll obviously do our best to get back to you with fixed Dynamic Queues asap 😉

Update: Dynamic normal queue is now disabled in all regions worldwide while we work on a fix (as an fyi, NA began to see similar issues despite the earlier launch on that server). Still no ETA to give but will be sure to have someone update this thread when that changes.

The PB team are the experts on this one, and their updates mean a lot more than mine. However, Lyte has been posted HERE with information – while unfortunately there’s not much to be said at the minute, the team are hard at work trying to fix this issue, get it tested, and get it out to you guys. We are as excited for this feature as you are – I honestly couldn’t wait to get home yesterday to play it, and I plan on leaving my placements until it’s back up and running due to the less stressful nature of things in the new champ select.

I know you guys want updates, and it sucks when we can only post “we’re working on it” – but that’s the truth and update we’ve got at the moment. As per Lyte, there’s no ETA at the moment, but I advise keeping an eye on the boards and Lyte’s twitter for updates as they’re available.

Thanks for sticking with us on this – we know it’s far from a smooth experience, but personally I truly believe the new champion select and dynamic queues are great features, and cannot wait to see them (back) on live to get some games with you guys on the rift!

When we first announced that Hextech Crafting and loot was heading to PBE, we saw a few questions about how champion shards would work for players who already had all champions unlocked. We werenâ€™t ready to answer those questions then, we are now at the point where we want to reach out to the community for feedback.

Hereâ€™s our current, leading design:

All players (whether you have all champions unlocked or not) can use champion shards that are duplicates of champions you already own to increase the Champion Mastery level cap of specific champions up to level 7.

This will increase the level cap, but wonâ€™t increase your actual Champion Mastery experience or unlock any associated rewards (unless you already have enough mastery points on a champ to be level 6 or 7, in which case youâ€™ll immediately unlock those rewards)

Example: You own Jax. Using a Jax shard, you can raise the Champion Mastery level cap to 6 for Jax.

Alternatively, you can combine 3 champion mastery shards to unlock another level on any champion you choose.

Example: You spend three random champion shards to increase Champion Mastery level and a pop up appears allowing you to select any champion. You select Renekton, raising his Champion Mastery level cap to 6.

We also plan to offer chests in the store that can be purchased with IP that would contain specific types of champion shards. For example, we might offer a Demacian Chest for a limited period of time which would contain champion shards for champions associated with Demacia. We might also offer chests like these via other means, like rewards for accomplishments in ranked.

Our goal with this is to ensure champion shards drops always feel like a step towards something players care about and to make to the highest tiers of champion mastery feel exclusive and valuable. Ultimately we think this will make it more meaningful when you drop your mastery badge emote after a clutch (or not so clutch) play. It’s possible that there could be some other reward types associated with higher champion mastery levels, but this is still TBD. Weâ€™re excited to get Hextech Crafting and loot out to you all and curious to hear your feedback.

It’s the level 6 and 7 cap that unlock not the experience required for the levels themselves. So you’ll still have to earn your way up. Since the chests require strong performances (S grades) on champs, it puts more weight on unlocking these levels.

Somebody else pointed out since these rewards are more exclusive they should probably be cooler. That’s a good point also.

We did do some exploration into a possible Shaco direction a year or two ago. That was a gameplay only update that didn’t hit the mark at the time however, so got put on hold (it was some opportunistic work to see what was possible in some free time, rather than a prioritized project). Evelynn we haven’t looked into a major gameplay update for since her rework years ago. I do think we’ll need to take a look at how stealth/stealth detection works again sometime in general though (possibly as part of an assassin class update at some point).

As far as VUs go I’d expect both to be pretty sizeable projects given the age of their current models/anims/VFX etc. Taric’s our current priority, and Yorick’s the likely full relaunch after that. After that it gets less certain. There’s some argument for Shaco or Eve certainly, some other champs we’d really like to tackle too though (Urgot and Warwick for example).

We pulled those changes because they weren’t hitting the mark, in terms of solving issues on Galio or making him more satisfying to play. For one thing there’s not really any available power budget for an alternative passive. Galio’s not popular at present, but he’s pretty effective in the average game, so we don’t have space to add power to him without pulling it elsewhere.

I’m not 100% certain as to the original intent, Galio was designed before my time at Riot. I’d be fairly sure the goal was to keep Galio further forward in fights by locking the healing to him, rather than having him potentially lower on health himself and therefore hanging back poking and buffing allies.

Vlad/Swain lack the range, and in some cases the mobility, of other mages certainly, and get extended damage patterns and health sustain in exchange. That’s fairly similar to the trade offs a lot of juggernauts make, so yes, if that’s what you mean I’d agree with you.

What does “debilitation” mean to you? I see suggestions like this come up from Cass players pretty often, but it’s usually not followed by much more than wanting DoTs to be emphasized on the kit, and Twin Fang to be de-emphasized. Do keep in mind I’m not saying this is incorrect. However, I do hope that if we were to do poisons or “debilitation” better, it would manifest in a way that wasn’t just stronger DoTs. Unique debuffs? Time delayed afflictions? More CC? Is it simply that you want your Q to be stronger in lane?

Please do keep it civil from this point forward. I’m interested in what’s going on here, minus a lot of the aggressive nature (though I understand it to a degree, to be fair).

It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but I put in some changes to Cass this last week that should make her no longer cancel her Movement or Attack orders when casting Twin Fang. It’s not something that could ever be data-mined, so it may not appear on PBE, but it should be there. Assuming it gets through QA bug-free, it should be there for 6.2. For those unfamiliar, this treatment was also given to Ryze a few patches after his release, and it seemed to make his play a bit smoother.

That sounds like something that new tech would need to be created for, so it doesn’t seem like a quick easy thing at the moment, unless there’s an internal workaround that could do it that I’m spacing on.

I’m not really one to field buff requests, sorry. If there was something about her gameplay that mechanically wasn’t functioning, I may be in line to help in the immediate, but despite her low win rate in solo queue, the fact that Cass saw pro play as recently as this week does suggest she’s not incredibly far off from a pure power level perspective.

Regardless, it would be great if this conversation could move back toward directional changes for Cassiopeia, and away from game balance. I came into this thread with the objective of learning what kinds of directional changes players are interested in for Cass.

Honestly, it feels like a bit of both to me, where the allowable power level of a champion is something like the maximum of their power level in Solo Queue and their power level in competitive play. When the discrepancy between those is too great, we run into issues, issues that are a frequently a reason for doing Champion Updates. Ryze has some of this going on at the moment, where hisallowable power is regulated by the fact that he’s a competitive power pick despite being sub par for most players.

We’ve talked about terrain destruction abilities a fair bit and do think there’s some pretty cool gameplay opportunities in them. Making such abilities look good enough’s the biggest challenge remaining at this point (still some technical and design issues to solve, but of a smaller scale). Given the way our maps are made there’d be a lot of work on the art side needed to support such abilities. I’m hopeful we’ll get there at some point, definitely won’t be in the short term though.

Some form of ongoing flight on a champion at some point’s pretty likely, and mainly a question of finding the right gameplay fit, rather than technical limitations. Would be a really different ability though to terrain destruction of course (changing one characters options a lot versus changing both teams’ options a lot).

There’s lots of work to do on her right now, since she just recently got picked from all stars, but I assure you she will be coming out – we’ve just got to make it super awesome first. I’ve always wanted to make sounds on a skin for her. Sorry on the lack of specific dates, but you’ll hear more as it’s getting developed!

[ Note ] Today (Jan. 19th),Â Riot will issue a statement whether the new Champion Select will be used for Ranked queue this season. Stay tuned!

To be clear, I think you’re making a few assumptions. It’s pretty universally agreed among industry experts that voice chat introduces some amount of toxicity into an ecosystem or game; however, that doesn’t mean we are opposed to it.

We definitely understand the importance of communication in a competitive team-based game, and every time we talk about voice chat, we mention that we’re open to it, we’d just want to change some of the basic designs of voice chat to mitigate some of the known issues.

The Bravo Ray designed the appearance of Jhin (concept artist =/= gameplay designer) and was excited about the idea of a ‘mystery box’. You see this creepy thin guy who is asymmetrical because of a huge shape on his shoulder, you have no idea what it is… until the final act.

What it is is four huge magically infused artillery shells racked up on a hextech accelerator built right into his mechanical shoulder (he’s sacrificed much for his art). When attached to Whisper (and the extended barrel for accuracy) it forms the final piece in the biggest, most powerful gun Runeterra may have ever seen! Kinda reminds me of Shen in Kung Fu Panda 2.

A big key thing to understand about Ekko is that his Z-Drive doesn’t always work the way he wants it to, mostly owing to the fact that it’s homemade hex-tech that runs on the exotic properties of a shattered crystal.

In terms of Parallel Convergence, (story wise) is what happens when you wrinkle time too much — sometimes it tears and your parallel self lends a hand to seal the breach. I mean, he’s the boy who shattered time. That can have some unintended consequences.

With Phase Dive, Ekko basically blinks out of the timeline, returning at opportune moments.

As you can tell, he’s probably made (and broken) a few Z-Drives.

The Timewinder feeds off his Z-Drive. However, he initially designed it to have an entirely different function — probably a smoke or flash bomb — but… it didn’t quite work as intended. In fact, Ekko’s sort of unsure about how it works, but it works reliably enough (and with no lingering effects) for him to be cool with chucking it around all willy-nilly.

Thanks for making me think about this stuff. One of my 2016 goals is to write Ekko a long bio, and you’re inspiring me to put it before my other work that has deadlines (because I am a triple-A rated procrastinator — heck I’m supposed to be making my wife bolognese for dinner at the moment).

WAAARGHbobo:Â If i remmember correctly, he’s an enforcer for one of the piltover owned companies in Zaun. Never had a real name, was called hexa-thug or something in script.
I think a sion skin for him would be dope. Giant arm acts as (and maybe even transforms into) the axe. Prob couldnt be a champ though as he occupys a space already covered by urgot and sion.

Weâ€™re the Rioters behind Hextech crafting, loot, and the upgrade to Champion Mastery rewards and weâ€™ll be jumping into this thread around 11:00AM PST (about an hour from now) to answer your questions about the design and testing of the new system.

First time youâ€™re hearing about Hextech Crafting and Loot? Learn more about the 2016 Season changes at the updated website here and then ask your questions below!

The TLDR is we wanted to reward different playstyles, and having different ways of earning chests and keys lets us to do that.

Chests are rewards for playing a diverse range of champions while demonstrating skill and teamwork. If you already play a diverse range of champions, or have friends you play well with, you’ll find it easier to earn chests than a solo player who has a narrow champion pool.

Keys are random rewards for winning matchmade games of League of Legends. You can play ARAM, Ranked, Normals etc. The intent here is you play League the way you want, so we’ll be tuning with the goal that you’ll earn keys at about the same rate regardless of which matchmade queue you are playing in or what champion you are playing. Drop rate is higher with friends, but you won’t need to play with friends to earn keys at a good rate.

What we’re going for with the above is players are rewarded for mastering a diverse range of champions, but players who prefer to play a smaller champion pool can still do most of the time.

I know there are some detailed questions about exactly how chests and key drops work, I’m going to leave that one for RiotSocrates to answer!

We didn’t include any IP sink in this iteration of the system, since we wanted it to be valuable to both new and old players and thought it was better to just give away the rewards for free rather than to (IP) charge for them.

With that being said, the problem of large IP balances is definitely on our radar and we’re looking at ways to help improve the situation this year.

The new rewards are purely based on S grades after the system goes live, so there won’t be additional rewards for having achieved level 5 on champs. That said, being level 5 on champ means you’ll probably achieve S grades more easily when the system goes live.

You primarily get essences by disenchanting shards. You primarily get shards by opening chests. You get permanent loot by upgrading a shard (shard + essence) or by re-rolling 3 shards of the same type (e.g. 3 skin shards)

Great question! We don’t try to maximize dollars earned, but rather find a win-win balance of Player Value and Riot Value. We wanted to improve rewards and progression within League of Legends and thought the loot and mastery reward systems would be a great way to give players cool content for playing League and performing well with a diverse group of champs. We are also trying to bring players some of the lowest price points and biggest discounts for purchased content, so players can more easily build their collections.

The loot inventory is separate from the store inventory, so you won’t be able to disenchant items you’ve purchased directly from the store or played with previously. You can use refund tokens if there are skins you no longer want and use the RP to get chests / keys.

Your scenario is correct, although it’s premade not just teammates. If someone in your premade gets an S (S-, S or S+) and you haven’t already earned a chest on the champion you’re playing, you get the chest.

We’ve made sure that the value of the items you get from the chest is more than it costs, so there shouldn’t be any bad outcomes. Other than that, it all depends on your personal preference of what content you like. 🙂 You can get Ultimates

We feel great about the launch in that we’re really excited about the system and can’t wait for players to use it and give us feedback. You’re right that this is the first time we’ve had skins be earnable in this sort of way. That’s why we’ll be going to PBE for a longer than usual amount of time, and will do a beta in one region before we roll out everywhere else.

All of the team play a ton of games so between us we’re familiar with similar systems elsewhere. We definitely tried to look at those systems and see what works and what doesn’t, as well as considering what sort of crafting system League needs. For example, we didn’t want to do something that adds a ton of overhead between each game, because after a great game, you generally just want to roll into the next game.

Several screenshots of Jhin (the new upcoming ADC from the recent teasers) and his splash art were leaked on Reddit. Note that thisÂ unconfirmed and may not be official:

Caveat: I don’t design anything at all, I just like playing League of Legends.

Turret targeting is something that might be a point of improvement, but what would that look like? Clearly turrets should not prioritize champions, or pushing lanes becomes extremely difficult. I’m not a fan of the %hp idea, because it makes tanks less relevant, and they already struggle as a class with shifts in the meta.

What are some examples of how turret aggro should work better? Here’s my assumptions:

The tower shouldn’t switch targets if it’s already hitting a champ. The tower should prioritize champions only when there are no minions/pets, and only when they deal damage to friendly champions.

Tower aggro rules should be easy to understand and consistent. (e.g. doing damage to an enemy vs. hitting an enemy with non-damaging cc – either damage should trigger aggro, or any ability/damage should trigger aggro. Imo we should maintain the current functionality).Tower attack rate should be consistent (no tower autoattack reset on champ aggro).

I think I just fundamentally disagree that towers should be able to take on mega-tanks. If they supplement your team’s damage and do around 10-15% of a tank’s HP in 5-6 seconds, that seems reasonable. Any change to towers that makes them threatening to tanks during all stages of the game either:

Hmmm, yeah, I think I echo that sentiment. If there’s anything that’s really coalescing for me in this thread, it’s that towers resetting while you are still in the middle of getting dived feels pretty bad. Like I’ve sad a bunch of times, I don’t work on this stuff, but I’ll chat with some folks about this thread and see what they think. I can’t promise that we’ll make a change along those lines as I don’t fully understand the design principles behind towers, but I’ll follow up on it 😀

Nocturne’s ult behaves the same way Malph’s does. They’re both unstoppable during the ult, they’re not CC immune though, so can be CC’d and, if the duration’s long enough, will still be CC’d after the ult ends. Ryze snare or Veigar stun for example won’t stop them from completing their ults, but can limit them after they end if applied mid dash.

We’ve been talking about possible Tahm nerfs in 6.2 or 6.3, those aren’t certain yet though (want to make sure we’re nerfing the correct thing(s), want to investigate whether we should be buffing something like his ult’s useability at the same time).

Even if we do nerf him though I’d still expect him to be a pretty difficult match up for Vi. A lot of her power is in her ability to close distance reliably to get onto the target of her choice. That’s not very useful against Tahm direct, given you’re not going to be bursting down a tank, assuming similar XP/gold, and he’s absolutely fine with people putting themselves in his face.

[ Note ] Miss Fortune’s E will be nerfed in Patch 6.1. You can find the notes HERE.

I’ll follow up with the designer working on the MF changes and get back to you, see what his thoughts are on the current state of AP builds on her (not familiar enough with them myself). Can’t make any promises, if AP MF’s in a decent spot on live at present though might be appropriate to increase a ratio somewhere to avoid an unintentional nerf.

We’re intentionally nerfing AD MF with nerfs to her passive and E. It’s possible AP MF may be getting unintentionally nerfed at the same time, I’m unsure whether or not that build’s been assessed internally relative to this change.

A base damage nerf and AP ratio buff would certainly change AP MF’s power curve, keeping that build generally power neutral overall should be doable though if we conclude that’s appropriate here.

Blah I understand this feeling too. I didn’t start playing until pretty much everyone and their super-cool grandmothers all had smurfs that queued up at the same time as I would. It was really confusing and frustrating that so many of my fellow lvl 6 ‘noobs’ could be so much better than I. It can be a pretty sucky experience in the game sometimes.

It’d be neat to do a study on smurfs — I wonder if I could have a chat with a few people around the office to see what we could learn about ’em. Noooo guarantees of course, but it’s definitely a topic I’d be interested in helping out with the research.

I appreciate being able to lurk these boards, particularly in ‘Player Behavior & Moderation,’ even if I definitely don’t get to read everything, and I don’t always comment on things I do get around to reading. Since I’m a gamer too, player pain is a very real thing to me, so these matters are of a particular interest to me and I’d love to be able to make an impact whenever possible.

I can’t speak to much on the past on this one, since I haven’t worked on my full reboots of champions, but moving forward, I think it’s pretty safe to say that on big projects like Taric, Poppy, etc., you can expect new or updated lore, and you can probably not expect new lore on smaller stuff.

For Taric specifically, I’m not the writer of the lore, but I am one of the people that’s trying to help give feedback to the writer. I don’t think there should be a bunch of characters’ lore being reduced in the near future, and we haven’t written the final lore yet for Taric, but I’d expect it to be closer to 3 paragraphs than 3 sentences.

I’m not sure what the immediate balance plans are for her at the moment, but if given the opportunity, I would like to be able to go back and re-evaluate her laning experience, which I think is pretty poor. Specifically, it feels like a constant struggle to manage the minion wave without getting chunked for half your health by your lane opponent.

Garen’s opportunities for opponents are intended to be via kiting or playing around his E cooldown, though I can see a legitimate case being made that he is too strong. Given the nature of his E, he can be a pretty binary matchup for other melee champions to try to fight, especially squishier ones, and I think that the introduction of items like Dead Man’s Plate gives a sort of inevitability to him catching up to people.

We actually have a full-time team comprised of high Diamond to Challenger level players that spend most of the day playing upcoming content and giving us advice on how to hit our goals on it. These guys are really dedicated, too. Currently, they spend all day at work playing/testing 6.01 League of Legends internally, and then all night playing 5.24 League of Legends on the Live environment.

Riot Afic leads up that team. He could probably speak to it more if you could get a hold of him.

I think about things like that sometimes, and try to do it where possible, but it’s always important to make sure to do it in a way that doesn’t compromise the balance of the champion. Using this example, AP Support Miss Fortune is actually somewhat a thing at the moment, so you can see how buffing fun off builds might inadvertently cause issues.

Number of champions is not yet determined, but as far as the level of change in a single kit goes, our mindset is generally that there is one highlighted change (usually in the form of a new skill) to the champion, with other small changes to the existing kit to support it.

I think item diversity is pretty good for mages, strictly as far as options go before considering things like gold and slot efficiency, which I haven’t personally put a ton of thought into yet. As far as Deathcap goes, I can see a case being made that it limits design space and build diversity.

Not really sure we have a specific timeline on Ryze. ricklessabandon was talking to me about some change opportunities here. I’ll have to follow up and see if there are any plans for Ryze in the short term.

I’m not on the team that works on it, so I can’t really speak to the balance state of the champion, or what the particular reasons are for why she is balanced the way she is at the moment.

As a member of the update team, and as someone that comes here and reads Cass threads that pop up every now and again, all I can really say is that I’m aware of the identity crisis stuff she’s got going on, and that if we ever looked at her again from a ‘small update’ perspective, that is where I personally would start. There are a lot of champions that could use stuff in this regard, however, so no promises.

Though I understand where you’re coming from, I actually think Anivia’s passive is actually in a pretty good spot. The fact that it can fail makes it really awesome when it works, and provides some really cool tension in a lot of cases. Another thing to consider is that the power budget that would have to go into her passive would be much higher if it was much more resilient, and that would have to come from somewhere, as she’s not a low performer as far as her balance state goes.

We would probably do Ice Bird different today if it was a new champion, but I actually think Anivia’s kit has stood up well against the tests of time. It’s arguably lost some of its luster as mobility increases, but Crystallize (W) is still very, very powerful, for example.

Answering this question since it’s one I’ve seen less of, and I think the others have mostly been answered.

Generally speaking, we should avoid making either Armor or Magic Resist supremely more powerful on champions when compared to the other stat, unless it is a very specific intended strength/weakness. Taric falls into this category, where being an exceptionally good pick against physical damage teams is very much an intended strength. I intend on maintaining some of that in his upcoming update.

As far as why we tend to not to strict reverts, I don’t think there’s any one rule for/against it that I know of. That said, we try to make changes that are directionally sound for champions/items/masteries when we make them, so that even if other factors that contribute to their balance change, we’re happy with the decision in the long run. Sejuani and Cinderhulk is a pretty common case people talk about here, but at no point do I think either of them was really unacceptably weak, and I think there are similar things going on with Swain and DFT right now.

Also, I do think that it’s easy for players to feel like their champion has been overnerfed. I’ve historically felt this way about champions I played as well. If you imagine all the various power levels that champions could fall at as a spectrum, it seems reasonable to say there’s a segment of that spectrum that could be considered allowable power levels. As someone who has felt this way in the past about certain champions, I think it’s easy for players to be biased into thinking certain champions power should rest at the upper end of that allowable part, while at the same time being perfectly comfortable with other champions they are less attached to resting at the middle or lower end.

I’m a HUGE Caitlyn player also. She was the first champion I ever really took seriously and wanted to ‘main’. I’m also one of the people that worked on the Champion Update team helping mold Caitlyn into what she is right now.

With that being said, I do feel that Caitlyn changed a bit of her early game power to her late game power. I max Q first then go to E. I do love the traps but I find more reliable damage with the other two. I also get Warlord’s in the mastery tree because I feel that I am banking for that late game fight more than just doing the early game trade. This changes who I want to support for me.

Another thing I’m finding hard is that Caitlyn has a hard time securing kills in a team fight. She tends to hope that an auto kills them and doesn’t really have the ability to take them.

I was hoping you’d be able to tell me what masteries, runes and ability order you are going. I’d like to talk about this more, see how you feel more compared to certain match-ups. I think she should lose early to MF and Lucian. They have early game steroids and ultimates that can be used effectively mid trade compared to Caitlyn where you are charging something.

Definitely will be looking more into all this. There are eyes on this and we will not just abandon ship on Caitlyn. Caitlyn should be leaning more towards traps and that zoning aspect. I am not promising anything but no one likes when a champion feels worse than before.

Thank you for sharing your ideas and analyzing what issues Caitlyn has right now. A lot has changed, definitely hasn’t settled yet.

This music is inspired by Shyvana lore. Mostly the bit before she joined Demacia as the Elite Guard. Here I wanted to make something which makes the listener be reminded of the origin of Shyv. Mostly about her being an outcast because of her mixed race and the death of her father who made her who she was. This isn’t a very angry song. But I’ve tried to make it as intense as possible with the limiter resources I have. I really hope you like it!

Today I have been reading a thread by HIMM Sandwich that basically comes down to how it feels like Riot sometimes ignores player sentiment/feedback, and then goes silent when asked for answers. I won’t be the best source of insight on projects that I didn’t work on, but feel free to use this post as a place where you can ask specifically about any of the projects I’ve worked on in the last year or two, and I’ll do my best to give you honest, direct answers about why things were made the way they were, and how I/we feel about these projects currently. Keep in mind that if they’re outside of issues I worked on, it’s likely I won’t be able to meaningful answers, and also that I won’t guarantee you’ll like what I have to share on some topics.

Here’s some of the stuff I’m likely to have insight into:

Past Projects:

Nidalee Champion Update

Ryze Champion Update

Ashe Champion Update

Juggernauts Champion Updates – Garen/Skarner

Marksmen Champion Updates – Quinn/Kog’Maw

Current Projects:

Taric Champion Update

Mages Champion Updates – ???/???

Feel free to ask about other stuff as well, but I will say I’m unlikely to be able to help on lots of other things. I should have time to give some answers the next few evenings.

It’s definitely an option, but it’s not the only way. We should probably be continuing to look for unexplored or less explored counterplay. Otherwise we end up with stuff like “Thanks Riot, another line skillshot.” I can see the same being true of any overused design, and I’d say I’ve probably leaned a bit too hard on “windows of power.”

As a ground floor game designer that doesn’t really make the big decisions like these, I really can’t do much more than make guesses on this subject, and I don’t really think that’s fair to you guys. Sorry if that sounds like dodging. I’d enlighten you with what I had if I had it.

From the perspective of someone works on champions and gameplay, I really do think that the number of cases where full reverts would be a step forward for the game are very few and far between (especially when considering the large amount of content regularly being added/modified in the game). I can’t think of many cases where I’d say a compromise isn’t the better solution, but that is a matter of perspective (and bias, I’m sure).

Nidalee is incredibly near and dear to my heart. Her design is all over the place and is a mess of complex mechanics and inputs, but I think she offers a really fun and unique challenge to players that put the time into her, and I love to watch a good player enjoy her.
*As far as which I’m most proud of from a craft perspective, I’d say Ashe. Her changes were simple and exciting to players, and I think they helped to bring her from what a lot of people considered a joke pick to a real contender at all levels.

As far as which I was most surprised by once released, I’d definitely say Kog’Maw. Every bit of feedback I had from internal testing and PBE feedback led me to believe he would be broken, which is so odd in hindsight given how much he’s struggled since the Marksman Update.

I would love to be able to share work with players earlier, as I feel like I make some of my most meaningful changes to champions after players have been exposed to it a bit. It’s something we’ve talked about doing, but we want to make sure to do it in a way that doesn’t set odd expectations or cause an uproar.

Real quick off the top of my head, I would ditch her passive, W, R, and parts of her E. I think she could be a really cool candidate for someone that uses her blades to attack two targets at once, or she could just generally deliver a lot better on blade telekinesis thing. I’d try to leave Q alone at all costs unless it was to make it feel better. I love Bladesurge.

I will say that I think she’s really held up against the test of time, as she seems to pop into and out of play reliably, but that may be a matter of statistics or something.

There’s a place and time for them, but I think they’re overused. These types of skills tend to give champions lots of options to deal with various scenarious, so it’s always tempting to consider them when making something.

I haven’t asked him about Riven specifically recently, but Xypherous is always funny when he talks about his champions, because they all seem to make him sad in some way or another, from Riven to Nautilus to Orianna. I’m not really sure if Riven makes him especially sad.

I think she’s in a decent place for the gameplay experience she offers. She feels good to play to a lot of players, and she’s pretty approachable, which is something we don’t do enough of nowadays. As to her fantasy, I agree it’s not really executed on as well as it could, and that kind of thing is definitely a consideration we make when choosing champions to do for these mass updates.

Generally, the goal of the Mage udpate is to make mages more distinct among other mages, and to give them tools that make them uniquely powerful in that space. We’d really like to be able to make a lot of these characters more valuable in a way that doesn’t just mean having more burst damage.

Malzahar because I think he’s a lot cooler thematically than his gameplay lets him be.
Swain because I think he’s generally just a mess.
Zyra because I think there are tons of opportunities to do cool things with her.
Cassiopeia because I’d want a chance to get her some of her poison identity back.

As to immobilizing effects stopping mobility spells. I think this is something we should do more often. One of the tricky things about doing it is making it feel intentional on the player’s part. For the longest time, I had this in for Rune Prison while doing Ryze’s update, but most of the time it happened, it was accidental at best.

Rumble’s not going to be part of the mage update mid year. He is struggling at the moment though, so we’ve got some love for him in the next patch. It’s stuff that’s not easily datamined however, so I’m not sure if it’s been widely noticed (smaller collision radius so he gets stuck on other units less, slight increase to Q range, Q ticking more rapidly for less damage giving it the same damage over time but making it a little easier to last hit with).

Lots of changes, especially visually. I’m really trying to hit a “battle healer” type of feel on him, so he’s probably a weird hybrid of a Tank, Support, and Juggernaut at the end of the day, though we never really committed to a particular class with him.

I can’t get into too many specifics on the Taric changes at the moment, but I do think that his ultimate is going to be a game changer that is especially well suited to be used with and against certain types of champions.

This is a cool idea that I hadn’t really thought of. It would probably need to have a little more gameplay to it, like if he converted all true damage to physical damage or something like that, but I think the idea is generally really cool.

The idea of a travel form-esque R for Quinn was one that was being tossed over a year ago internally. Jag started that, and when we decided to dedicate ourselves to a Marksmen project a few months ago, I still thought it was a cool idea and tried to make something of it. I agree with you that it has its oddities, and I think a lot of those come from trying to make too much change with too few resources to make it happen on my end. Her R is powerful, but the channel feels a little awkward and has some weird restrictions on it, and even to me it feels like it’s unique and fun, but that it’s also lower overall quality than I’d like it to be.

She seems like she’s on the strong side, but hopefully not by an excessive amount. I wouldn’t be surprised if the balance team wanted to nerf her in a few patches if she manages to rise to the top again.

When coming up with the concept of a Juggernaut, one of the things we were trying to do was actually separate out different groups of fighters, where Juggernaut ended up being one of those groups. That said, there will be a Skarner retrospective post coming to the Boards soon I believe, and one of the things we talk about there is that we probably improperly classified Skarner as a Juggernaut and not some other kind of fighter or tank.

I think Skarner does offer a unique play experience unlike any other champion has to offer, though I think it has too many costs attached to it. Were we to do Juggernauts over again, we likely wouldn’t choose to work on Skarner. I think there are definite upsides to his update, but we likely could have gotten more bang for our buck elsewhere.

We set out to make a champion that was defined by pre-determined zones of power, and I think in a lot of ways that was accomplished. That said, I don’t think the execution was as good as players deserved. It feels too forced/constrained.

Larger class updates like the Marksmen one take quite a bit of work, so we’re probably looking at a couple of those a year. Immobile mages is what we’ve decided to focus on for the next one, and we’ll have some early details on what that update will be focused on to share sometime this month. That’ll look at stuff like goals, which characters we’re planning to work on, rough timeframe etc, not specific kit changes.

We will also have some individual reworks done separately from those class based ones still. Those will generally either be champions that need a complete overhaul with new kits, visuals, VO etc (Taric and Yorick for example) or champions that have some fundamental gameplay problems we need to address (we believe Ryze for example needs more than just balance adjustments to be both healthy and fun at the same time). We’ll also occasionally do other small updates where a bit of extra bandwidth permits some opportunistic work, the Shen gameplay update for example which is getting pretty close.

As far as the number of subclasses go we’ve got about a dozen we’ve been using internally. Plan is to tidy the definitions of those up a bit and throw them into a devblog for anyone that’s interested.

Yeah, Brand’s definitely too strong at present. There’s a bug fix in 6.1 however that should take a noticeable amount of power away from him. At present his ult almost always prioritizes champions, rather than only priotizing champions if the target it’s bouncing from is already Ablaze. That makes it quite a bit easier for him to burst enemies down in most circumstances. The fix for that should go out in the patch next week, unless any delays crop up, after that we’ll then reassess and see if any further changes are needed.

Brand Q has a width of 60 (same as Mystic Shot as a point of reference). It’s elevated off the ground however, which means that at certain angles the hit location (on the ground) doesn’t match up well with the intuitive hit location (the missile itself). Almost all skillshots suffer from that problem to some degree, unless they’re at ground level. Due to Brand’s height however it’s more pronounced on him than most.

Yeah, Ohmwrecker’s still in a pretty sad spot. We did try out some stuff during the preseason development period to try and make it more interesting in its niche, with tower sieging still being its core. The most interesting approach, that alas didn’t end up working very well, was a version of it that replaced your auto attacks against towers with a ranged channel that dealt ramping damage over time. Gave melee champs a way to contribute siege damage without having to hard commit basically. Was fun to play around with, but hard to justify taking over other options, even on the characters it was theoretically designed for.

At some point we will take another look at Ohmwrecker, though I suspect if it doesn’t work out next time we’ll probably end up cutting it. Making it less situational, while keeping it tower focused still, could be a reasonable approach, and an allied tower interaction sounds worth a try as a result.

Challenger Nidalee’s splash art was previewed at the All-Star event recently. You can see the skin in-game HERE.

She’s got a distinctive playstyle, clear weaknesses, does things other champions don’t, has gameplay that matches her theme reasonably well and has decent counterplay. There’s room for a bit of visual improvement, though her texture and visual effects updates improved her a lot there. Expanded voice sometime would be nice certainly. Overall I feel she’s in a really good spot and would rather see work put into an enormous number of other champions than into Morg, returns there feel like they’d be pretty low for the time.

Yup, though pick a champion at random and odds are high they’ll be more in need of work than Morg.

We’ll certainly want to make changes to Akali whenever we tackle assassins though. We did do some initial exploration into possible kit changes, which showed some promise, we’ve put that on hold until we have a go at the class overall though.

People tend to complain about the most distinctive things a champion does. Nerfing based off what people complain about can eventually end up homogenizing characters a lot, with everyone having a similar feeling kit and unique effects reduced from character defining to secondary sources of novelty. To combat that we instead map out what we think are appropriate strengths and weaknesses for each champion and try and nerf/buff to preserve (or accentuate) those. In this case nerfing the MS with an ally devoured was we felt the best way to do that for Tahm in 5.24.

That’s not to say player frustration isn’t a really useful thing to monitor and understand, it’s really valuable for helping to build or modify those intended strengths/weaknesses in the first place. Being really informed of player feedback, frustations, needs, wants etc’s something we believe’s really important. That’s not the same though as believing that whatever a lot of people are saying is necessarily the right thing to do though.

Some of the time, yes. We expected Tahm Kench’s ally devour to create quite a bit of frustration when it saved allies for example. We felt during his development (and still do now too) though that that was an acceptable cost given the positive moments and gameplay Devour creates.

Preseason’s also increased her effectiveness a noticeable amount, so if we felt compelled to make balance adjustments to her I’d imagine they’d be nerfs not buffs. There are certainly some supports that are more dominant overall, we’ve either just nerfed, or are in the process of nerfing, those that are over the line though (some of whom will probably need further work too – looking at you Brand).

We feel Vel’Koz is pretty balanced, generally feels fair to play against and has some solid points of mastery for the Vel’Koz player. Only real issue with him is that what he does isn’t sufficiently differentiated from other mages/poke champs, so we’d like to find him a unique strength or aspect at some point.

Nothing too surprising so far, though it’s still really early days. We’re still seeing a lot of people playing the rework for the first time or two, so lot of initial mistakes being made and experimentation going on. No current plans for immediate changes, though we’ll reassess on Monday as well.

Sup guys, I’m Jeevun Sidhu aka Riot Jag. I’ve been a competitive gamer my whole life, and before getting Diamond in League of Legends my video game mistress of choice was World of Warcraft, where I held onto a 9 consecutive season streak of getting Gladiator in Arena before I realized it may be time to do other things (will put away my horn now). I’ve also really enjoyed Starcraft, Super Smash Bros, the Batman: Arkham, XCom, and Metal Gear Solid series, and (might be dating myself a bit here) I have a soft spot for Goldeneye 007 and Mario Kart 64. I got into League through my WoW friends when the servers were down for maintenance. Someone in Vent said they just started playing LoL and it was really fun, and I replied that if I wanted to micro 1 unit for 45 minutes I’d just build a Ghost in SC2. I was a little ignorant at the time…

Aside from Video Games, I enjoy Sports Cars and Motorcycles. I’m currently running a Ducati Panigale 899 that I keep under armed guard, seeing as the last two bikes I got after moving to LA were both stolen in a matter of weeks. I’ve also always loved sports, particularly Football (Giants fan for life) and Basketball. I listen to a range of music, but am mostly into Hip-hop and House/Electro. My Spotify has been blasting a lot Run the Jewels and Disclosure lately, although my boy Kanye is never far off the playlist. Before I was a professional nerd for a living, I was something totally different – a software engineer at Microsoft.

WHAT AM I DOING AT RIOT?

Some of the fun stuff I’ve done at Riot include the Lucian mini-rework, Runeglaive and Zeke’s Harbinger, and most recently I lead the charge on Rift Herald. I’ve spent the last 2 years on Live Gameplay (aka the Rito balance team) nerfing your favorite champ, but I am moving to new Champion team to find new ways to add more anti-fun into the game. Until that happens, I’ve had front row seats to every balance and game health struggle that we’ve had in League for the past two years, so feel free to hit me up with anything in that area.

WHAT AM I GOING TO TALK ABOUT?

I’d like to talk about interesting struggles with the live state of the game, ranging from the intricacies of preserving game health, to how to interpret win rate metrics, to how we handle eSports concerns. I might also get into what it’s like for a novice champion designer to start taking on the task of building a brand new iconic experience in LoL. Finally, ADCs are my peoples, so if that’s your passion, or if you just need help with that Vayne build, I’m down with the clickers.

This one I don’t get at all. I think if you searched through most of the pro games this year, you would find Leblanc and Zed to not be nearly as dominant as say Viktor or Azir in terms of pick rate. That aside, it seems like you’re creating a false dichotomy here between choosing between “flashy plays” and “healthy gameplay”. I don’t think we’d say someone like Zed has an inherently unhealthy pattern (I’d say he’s fairly healthy for an assassin), but there’s no reason why something can’t be fair and flashy.

Again, it’s really an issue of balance here. You can’t argue with the level of power that Cinderhulk was giving to characters at the time. There are many reasons to like the teamfight-pacing presence that tanks give, but these champions had no tradeoffs at the time – they were becoming damage dealers with extreme durability and CC.

On that topic though, no one was happier about the success of Cinderhulk than me – that project was the combined efforts of Fearless and I (mostly him!), and I was overjoyed at the spike in competitive diversity that the Cinderhulk patch brought to the game. But the theory that we chased away diversity by nerfing Cinderhulk is false. The diversity spike partially arose due to the uncertainty of solving the game at a pro level since we upended the meta (tanks in Jungle instead of top lane, so now carries in top lane, so now different types of supports/ADCs that have to deal with top lane carries, etc.). The pro diversity levels were already falling quickly in the weeks after Cinderhulk came out due to them solving the meta rapidly, before we even managed to get the nerfs out to the servers that pros played on. So while Cinderhulk as a disrupting force was positive in driving diversity, it couldn’t ever hold that permanently – we have to keep making changes to the game to do that.

Lee Sin did get a small buff in 5.16. The previous five patches that he received a balance adjustment before that were nerfs. I am a little puzzled that the assessment is that he is getting unfairly privileged to be at a high power level that is inappropriate. However, I get that he has been at at stable level of power for a long time, and my answer to that is that I think he is a fairly healthy champion. He has a high level of execution required to succeed on the part of the Lee Sin player, he has some major weaknesses (particularly towards the late game), and he has always felt like a somewhat risky pick, even when strong.

I don’t speak for Riot’s future balancing strategy here, but for my 2 cents, Lee is a cool champion that still gives his opponent options when succeeds, which to me is something we can maintain as someone who appears in a lot of games.

In regards to Anivia, I’d ask you a question first – if very few people complained about her, but she was still incredibly powerful, almost unfairly so, should we leave her alone? Would we leave balance decisions up to capturing the tone of broad player perception?

I think our data put Anivia going up nearly 4% in win rate with preseason – most likely due to the efficiency of RoA and the addition of Deathfire Touch. That’s a pretty huge change.

With Elise, our changes this year have been intended to balance her as more of a mage threat, not as a tank. The 5.18 and 5.16 changes both hit base damages, not ratios.

Swain is just a tough guy to balance. He’s kind of a drain tank, and he’s largely about dot damage and healing, so nerfing the E seemed like the wrong thing to do there. The effectiveness of his CC seemed out of line with that type of champion, which is why we went with the W. I feel your pain there though, you could make compelling arguments to hit other areas.

Hmm, that’s interesting. I understand that their maximum window of being ahead may be smaller (because gold eventually catches up), but we have put a lot of changes in place in preseason to push forward rewards for early aggression (towers falling faster, Rift Herald, vision changes etc). I think most of our evaluations say that a lot of early-game champions got a big boost since preseason (Shyvana went up in win rate, didn’t she?).

I think there are specific champions like Pantheon that may have some itemization problems. The crew on the Systems team is hard at work on that one.

Agree that he’s never really been diverse. There’s almost always one correct path and then a few wrong ones.

We have played with that idea for E before, but it largely resulted in the same thing (one optimal path, this time never with E). I think for Kha’zix’s evolution pathing to be in a state that isn’t solved before game start requires each evolution to power him up along 4 distinct axes/contexts, each of which are likely to change in relative importance within the game. That’s very very hard. Maybe not impossible though.

This is a really interesting one. I think the solo Q Support/ADC relationship and the organized 5v5 Support/ADC relationship are so incredibly far apart they may as well be different games.

What’s really cool about a good duo is that they both have to constantly take “trust falls” in lane to be effective – you have to make a move KNOWING that if you eat a CC your partner will use a summoner at the right time to make sure the play works. The problem is that in solo q the communication is so sparse that this goes wrong fairly often, unless you’re just on the same page because your game knowledge is deep enough (this is one major reason why playing ADC is so painful at lower MMR ranges). There’s nothing worse than having a trust fall where your partner doesn’t catch you, and it can reshape your approach to laning in a very negative way. On the other hand, when two of you are on comms together and perfectly on point, it’s incredibly rewarding and one of the best experiences in League of Legends.

So, to bring it back to the designer’s perspective, where do we want to strengthen the experience? Do we want to create solutions that make a better play experience for the low communication solo queue game? That would lead us to creating mechanics and items that have low coordination requirements, low failure rates, and correspondingly low rewards for success. Do we want to reward the mastery of a competent duo playing properly? Well, then this is a mechanic that has a very limited reach, as the vast majority of players will not be able to enjoy it as consistently. When CertainlyT had to figure out how to balance Kalista’s W passive, or I had to figure out how to reward Zeke’s Harbinger properly, these are some of the things we had to struggle with.

Personally, I’d really love if we made another Conduit-style item like Zeke’s, but opened the space up a bit for different types of duos (maybe a double melee dive buddy item, for instance).

A few metrics here that I really like are “win rate by game time” and “average experience level”. The game time graphs will occasionally give us a very sharp idea of where to address a part of the character that is really out of control. For example, pre-5.18 Veigar tended to win a fairly small portion of games that ended at 20 minutes, and a fairly large portion of games that ended at 45+ minutes. After the buffs to his W cast time, we saw a fairly small change at the 45+ minute win rate, but a huge one at 20+ minutes, which was a large indicator to us that we had changed Veigar’s power curve in a way that we were not comfortable maintaining.

That directed us to looking at base damages instead of hitting the cool thing about Veigar that players really loved (the infinite scaling fantasy), and gave us a pretty solid foundation for doing so. The “average experience level” one is one that’s really hard to convey to most players, but it basically indicates that if the vast majority of players on a champion have a huge amount of games under their belt, then we shouldn’t look at a champion’s win rate and be surprised if it’s high. For example (these numbers aren’t accurate, just using them to illustrate), if the average Riven player in your game has 70 games played on the champion, while the average Brand player has 15 games, it wouldn’t be a unfair statement to say that Riven could have a higher average win rate than Brand and still be equally powerful.

That’s a tough one. I think for preseason in particular we’re aware that the game is very volatile and unsolved. Optimal item builds can shift (or be nerfed…), certain exploitative strategies may be removed, and most of all, preseason is a time to just have fun and play – so I think we’re reluctant to instantly smack a champion in the face unless they’re fairly far out of line. Which leads me into…

A lot of the decisions to nerf the “hidden OP” champs came from being fairly confident that these guys were WAY far out of line. We have a fairly significant amount of data demonstrating that these guys had pretty obscenely high levels of power in this patch.

I don’t know the answer to that question. I can tell you that I felt a lot of the same way as players did in 5.16, that the game felt pretty far off in terms of balance compared to what we’ve done historically. Everyone has taken a hard long at what went right and what went wrong there so we can improve on that in the future, which to me is something that’s cool about how Riot – we definitely have failures, but we do our best to make them mean something positive.

Oh man, Bard. Rarely do I see data tell me one thing that so heavily disagrees from my personal experience. I honestly feel like a Bard main is absolutely terrifying, but he can so easily cause catastrophic failures for his own team that his effectiveness can vary incredibly hard.

[ Note ] The Mandrake ward is an experimental ward on the PBE that gives no vision and only pings you when it detects Champion movement.

I think it would be a fairly good thing for Eve to be honest. I’m not so sure her current form of favored counterplay (Pink ward + ward her jungle camps) is sufficient that we can leave in her tuning in a satisfying place. That’s heavily speculative though.

Quick introduction here – Iâ€™m Pwyff. In previous lives Iâ€™ve played video games competitively, ghost-wrote college essays for tuition, wrote terrible movie scripts for free dinners, and did the whole video game journalism / editor-in-chief bit before arriving at Riot Games.

I come from a mixed competitive gaming background of: FPSes (CS 1.6, Natural Selection, TFC), MOBAs (DotA, HoN, Bloodline Champions), and MMORPGs (Ragnarok Online, FFXI, vanilla + TBC WoW), so my favorites tend to fall along those. In between games of League, DotA 2, and Duelyst, I was trying to speedrun Fallout 4 before dropping everything for the new Bloodborne DLC, but did not get very far. I think I rerolled twice, explored fifty million supermarkets, recruited Nick Valentine, decided to forcibly set my carry weight limit to 20,000 so I could hoard more things, realized I opened Pandoraâ€™s Box of cheat codes and shortcuts, set my melee stats to five billion, punched a few Deathclaws, and then couldnâ€™t go back to a normal life.

Outside of those things, I read, write, walk, and talk a lot (often at the same time).

I currently own: 0 cats.

WHAT AM I DOING AT RIOT?

A tl;dr would be that Iâ€™m a communications lead, working on all things to do withâ€¦ communicating. One of my first big projects was to improve the way we talk about change in League (particularly in design), and you may have noticed the experiments weâ€™ve run over the years, especially with the patch notes.

These days, Iâ€™m focused more broadly on how we talk about what we do and why we do it. With the preseason just shipping and the 2016 season update on the horizon, Iâ€™m in the process of helping with our next Riot Pls update, getting this Dev Corner to a functional place, and thinking about what people actually want to hear about.

WHAT AM I GOING TO TALK ABOUT?

Iâ€™ll probably use my monthly slot as an open forum to talk about what new things youâ€™d like to hear from other teams. If thereâ€™s a pressing topic youâ€™d like to see discussed, feel free to chuck them in and I can understand what we should be thinking – or talking – about. Or if itâ€™s just a miscommunication, I can talk about that as well.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR FROM ME?

Honestly? Let me know. I can tell you stories about life at Riot, or how teams work together, or about the cat I donâ€™t own.

Nah, you’re talking to the right guy. So I’ve got Scarizard directly trying to tackle this issue next year to get the Patch Rundown to a more authentic place.

The question I’d ask is this: what should the patch rundown be for?

Right now I think the larger issue is we have one piece of video content trying to serve multiple purposes, and ultimately failing at all. If I could flip back the curtain, our goals are:

Humanize the League design team

Discuss contentious changes, show our thought process

Engage in a meaningful discussion on changes

For others, however, the patch rundown is seen as a vehicle to communicate what’s changing. Should that be our goal? Are players happier if we just tell them “this is changing and here’s why” a la patch note format, or do they want to see discussion on the topic with people they trust?

This is basically the space we’re grappling with. In an ideal world, I’d love to have two streams of content – one high level TL;DR of the patch notes for quick, easy consumption, and another focused on deeper context.

Up front: I don’t think there are any plans to scope out pets into something deep and expressive. I believe the current view of pet controls is “tolerable,” if not very exciting.

You mention that adding pets / pet controls would add a lot more depth to the game while also offering more avenues of kit ideation (and skill expression), I wonder about that.

You can add any sort of mechanic to a game to make it more ‘complex,’ but good game design is about the right combination of complex mechanics. If CS:GO suddenly added bunny-hopping into the game, it certainly becomes more complex from a movement-shooter based perspective, but it loses out on the type of game it wants to be.

I’m assuming that adding a second unit to control beyond basic movement (aka the current system) will raise the mechanical complexity of the game, but if this assumption is true, should that be where League’s design focus is on? Most designers would say there’s a lot of really cool space to explore with single-champion kits. Perhaps there could be a champion designed with the ‘illusion’ of pet play – maybe a multi-unit champion with pre-defined positioning based abilities (hello, Orianna) – but the better question is what a complex pet system offers over other new systems.

Now that I’ve laid out the conceptual space, I can offer my own opinion.

I think there’s room for some cool pet mechanics in a game like League, but probably not the likes of Chen or Meepo. There’s this concept of transferable skills where if you learn, say, auto-spacing (heh) with Caitlyn, that’s a transferable skill to Jinx. At the very least this allows you to build macro-mastery of League (positioning, map movement, etc) while also investing in the micro-optimizations of a champion.

Looking at other games with pet champions, most characters with engaging multi-unit complexity reward the player for:

Cross-map macro play (Meepo teleports and movement)

Multi-unit micro-play (SC2 micro)

A really annoying radiance bear (Druid)

I do wonder if the skill investment for any of these is so different for League that a champion who rewards players on these axis just makes them a novelty. The issue with novelty champions who reward players on very unique mastery paths is is you end up with massive disparities between the haves and the have nots, and balance becomes a nightmare. Riven is a great example of this. Do we now balance Riven with the expectation that all players have learned to animation cancel? Or do we just allow this one champion who, when fully mastered, has access to more tools and more power than anyone else? I’m not saying Riven is objectively overpowered, but the more unintentional power a champion can access through clever mechanical manipulation, the higher chance a designer just didn’t account for it.

This paints a real black and white picture though. Could the pet system be improved even for the current pet-based champions? Absolutely. Is it an absolute priority for engineering to restructure how unit control occurs within League? I’m not sure.